Plucky State Rep. Charlie Brown, D-Gary, usually introduces a statewide smoking ban just to watch it die in the Senate. This year, he pulled his own bill rather than see it killed by fellow Democrats in the House:
As written, the bill would ban smoking in all public places except casinos, an exception Brown said he made to avoid becoming a target of gaming lobbyists. However, the bill was amended three times Monday, with Brown offering the first.
It might be getting even tougher for Evan Bayh than some of us thought it was getting:
Indiana's Evan Bayh is rapidly rising to the top of the GOP target list in this fall's midterms. Today, the National Republican Senatorial Committee will meet with House GOP Conference Chairman Mike Pence to convince him to run against Mr. Bayh.
[. . .]
All's well that ends well:
For there was a time on Sunday when it appeared as if the Colts might become victims of their own creation. It was, after all, Indianapolis who rested its starters halfway through a game against the Jets two weeks before the end of the regular season when the Colts had already clinched home-field advantage in the playoffs.
[. . .]
Ouch -- nice jab:
I have a feeling the Colts are going to play their starters against the Jets Sunday.
The oddsmakers are making the Jets 8-point underdogs.
Gov. Daniels spent much of his State of the State address bragging about the relative solvency of Indiana government, and that annoyed The Journal Gazette:
NPR travels to Anderson to find out whether Hoosiers, who went Democratic for the first time in decades and helped put Barack Obama in the White House, have any buyer's remorse:
George W. Bush won this county in both 2000 and 2004. But in 2008, like the state as a whole, it flipped and went Democratic, driven by economic worries and by the intense enthusiasm of Obama supporters.
Mike Pence has been getting pressure to take on Evan Bayh in the Senate race this year, and he's likely to get even more when he meets with the National Republican Senatorial Committee this afternoon. When he visited us earlier this month, he was pretty negative about the idea.
So it turns out that even gambling, prostitution and other vice businesses aren't recession-proof. But you'd think the dying business would be immune to economic vicissitudes. When you gotta go, you gotta, go, right? But a LaPorte factory that made casket parts has closed, putting about 50 people out of work:
Isn't this about the scariest photo you've ever seen?
The scary part is not that they're pretending to like each other and are ready to explode. The scary part is how comfortable they look together.
Bloomfield resident Damon D. Jackson had a baaad night:
According to the probable cause affidavit, the woman said they had been into an argument, she poured a drink on him and he hit her, then kicked or hit her in the back, then choked her, then grabbed the phone and hung it up when she tried to call 911, then smashed the phone to prevent her from calling again. She made the second call from a cell phone.
